


The Sightings That Are Made

by CorpseBrigadier



Category: The Bigfoot Scenic Byway - Lenny Green (Song)
Genre: Gen, Interspecies Awkwardness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-06
Updated: 2020-06-06
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:01:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24367717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorpseBrigadier/pseuds/CorpseBrigadier
Summary: A story of two artists and their encounters with one another.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 6
Collections: Jukebox 2020





	The Sightings That Are Made

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sweetcarolanne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sweetcarolanne/gifts).



> Based on Lenny Green's ["The Bigfoot Scenic Byway."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-hCHtUmJrw)

Chukosh knew, as everyone did, that the people outside the forest would come into it around summer’s end. She knew furthermore, as everyone did, that they had by common agreement allowed them to use it unmolested. If those strange hairless men wanted to come down to see the rivers or the stand amidst the trees with their strange devices and tools, they were welcome to do so. Living in the caves for a quarter moon had taken on something of a festival quality over the years, and they had learned to pass the time in storytelling and making gifts for the elders who were cavebound in all seasons.

Chukosh, however, differed from everyone in one respect. She thought that if it were fair that the men outside be allowed in, it was fair that the men inside should be allowed out. 

It had been explained to her many times that outsiders frightened easily: that like deer, they fretted when approached and scattered if one drew too close. It had been explained to her that the outside was full of noise and ugly things. Chukosh, for all she would puff and posture at her mothers and the mothers above them, had no reason to disbelieve these things.

Knowing she might not be welcome did not alter her resolve. Knowing she might be disappointed did not extinguish her yearning.

So, one late summer, when the insects were growing slow and the blue-winged birds had begun to disappear from their nests, Chukosh left the river and walked towards the boundaries of the forest. She went by night, following the cluster of stars in the shape of a currant blossom. The outsiders seemed to go about their business by day, and she did not want to disturb them.

Chukosh wandered until she found the great stone track that ran along the big river, and from there she followed its course at a distance. Now and again, one of the fast-running beasts the outsiders kept hissed by, its glowing eyes like little moons in the distance. She did not approach them. While it was seldom that they took large game, she had heard over and over again how one of old Wohliph’s birth-sons had been near crippled by crossing their path incautiously. She watched, though, whenever one passed, wondering where it was they headed—wondering what they looked like at rest and where it was they nested or browsed.

The brush gave way to grass and the grass gave way to dirt, and Chukosh thought more than once she should turn back, knowing how easy she was to spot in the open. She kept on though, following the hum and call of all things foreign to the woods. When she came to the place where the outsiders lived, it near took her breath away.

There was noise—a million chirps and ticks and growls from every boxy stone and humming flower about her—but nothing seemed ugly. Everything was spattered with bright colors or strung with strange lights, and even though there were no outsiders walking about their forest of rock and metal, Chukosh could smell them in every direction she turned. Everything felt exciting. It felt warm. She wondered what it must be like to live in such a place—where black hairs knit the trees together and the open sky seemed dimmed by so many glowing things below it.

As she wandered about, trying to keep to what shadows there were, she was suddenly arrested by a great still figure standing at the corner of two paths, towering and dark. It seemed to her that every strand of fur on her body stood on edge when she realized that it wasn’t an outsider.

It was a person: a person like her.

She thought to call out to her, to offer some word of warning that she was too far out in the open, but she thought better of it when she heard the whoop of an outsider’s high voice in the distance. She pressed close behind a great blocky cliff and watched as something lean and fast whirled by, carrying a dark-furred outsider down one of the many paths that cut through their settlement. He—at least she thought it was a he—gave a shout and threw something to the ground. She didn’t bother to inspect it. She knew it was one of those clear, glossy vessels that dotted the woods after the outsiders visited.

Chukosh was much more intrigued to see that the woman by the corner seemed unfazed even when it was thrown at her feet. It struck her as bizarre that the outsider had not thought anything of her standing there either, as though he were accustomed to seeing her. For a brief instant, she wondered if this might be a place where the two species lived together: if the woman in the distance were—after a fashion—an outsider herself.

She padded over in the hopes of asking her, and it struck her before she arrived that the other woman had no scent. When she drew close to her, it struck her further that the other woman had not and did not move.

When at last she lay hands on her sharp fur, Chukosh learned that the other woman did not breath either. She was cold and hard as river-stone.

Chukosh was baffled. This was not a woman at all.

As she stood there, trying her best to puzzle out what it was that stood before her, she lost sense of her surroundings. When she banged her knuckles against the false woman’s hands and feet, she did not think as to whom might be walking the paths around her. When she put her fingers curiously on her mouth and eyes, she did not hear the crunch of feet treading upon the gravel behind her. It was only when she heard a shout go up that she turned and saw an outsider, long fur falling over her shoulders as she gawked at Chukosh in stunned disbelief.

Chukosh gawked back for the span of several quick heartbeats, frozen like a deer mouse wedged into a corner. Then, fearful of any number of poor outcomes, she bounded off back towards the path from which she’d come, moving foot over knuckle on all fours, faster than she imagined anything on two legs could possibly run.

When she was finally back in the mountains, her birth-mother chastised her severely. One of her suckling-mothers added that she ought go and fetch rocks for her own death-caern before acting so recklessly again. Chukosh did her utmost to prove very contrite.

Later, however, when talk of her adventure had died down and winter drove the outsiders back outside, Chukosh made her own decisions as to how she would conduct herself. 

When she did fetch herself some rocks with which to build, she did so without the slightest mote of apology. 

* * *

Jessie Nata didn’t tell anybody what she’d seen that sweltering night of August 31st. She didn’t want to have her name forever thrown alongside the tourists; she didn’t want to make herself an associate of the town’s “believers”; and she sure as hell didn’t want anybody from outside coming around for an interview or—God forbid—a documentary. She went home, climbed into bed, and woke up to make love to her wife and jitter through the rest of the morning in a coffee-fueled haze. The only admission of the prior night’s events was a note she made in her journal, where she wrote the time 3:41 AM and followed it with three exclamation marks.

She spent the day deciding that August 31 was part of a whole other month better left behind her, and she spent all of a very long September doing her best to keep that resolution in mind. If she took a lazy stroll down by the art center and its iconic statue, she would always affirm to herself that she was just heading down towards the post office. If she found herself walking out in the middle of the night again, she made sure that it was always with a clear errand or destination in mind. By December, she had become quite the expert at making patrols all about Happy Camp that had absolutely nothing to do with the creature she thought she had seen roaming its streets one night.

By the time it was spring, Jessie was assured enough of her disbelief and disinterest that she did a few volunteer hours at the art center, doing setup for the monthly formals in exchange for having her fees for pottery waived. If she looked a little while at Cheryl’s big metal masterpiece while she was there each weekend, what of it? Statues were meant to be seen. If she took more walks in the woods, that was easily accounted for by the sunshine and warmth. It wasn’t as though she were hiking about with a camera and tripod. When she bought some binoculars, it was along with a proper birding guide, and she made a point to remark to Laura when the barn swallows came back north and filled the forest with blue feathers and twit-whirring.

It was only when the annual Jamboree came round again, when the whole park smelled of fry grease and resounded with the shouts of children overfilling a bouncy castle, that Jessie bit the bullet and decided to make a day trip out east. However much a fool she might make of herself, she couldn’t look that much a loon with the annual Siskiyou Cryptid Society tour as competition. The anniversary of those three exclamation marks was drawing near, and she decided now was as good a time as any to hash out the sentence that should precede them. She drove out along the byway, parked in the vacant lot alongside the hotel, and headed out towards the Klamath, following it as it traced along the great winding stripe of East 96. She typed out a text to Laura apologizing for being an idiot, but didn’t press send.

It was no surprise to her that she didn’t see Bigfoot. It was almost no surprise to her that she didn’t cross paths with the SCS, for all she had envisioned a number of snide confrontations. As the day wore on—as her sandwiches ran out and her sunscreen failed her—the most surprising thing she saw was what looked like a green-winged teal, which splashed away before she could take a photo on her phone.

She decided to head back just when the afternoon sunlight was turning gold, and turned back along one of the sharp winds of the river, ready to follow it back west. As she did so, she noticed a little islet she had missed before, and noticed that a short, boxy woman of about her height was standing upon it. 

Jessie gave a wave and thereafter realized that when she didn’t wave back it was not because she was ignoring her. Just to be sure, she pulled out the binoculars. 

The woman in the river—in the middle of nowhere—was made of stone.

She scrambled over, soaking the tops of her boots and wetting the bottom of her coat as inelegantly flopped toward the figure. When she finally made her way to land again, she was stunned to see that the statue—what else could she call it?—was made almost entirely of tiny stacked river stones, cemented together by mud and moss and who knew what else. What’s more, it wasn’t just roughly her height or her build; it was roughly… her.

It wasn’t an exact likeness, but the statue had her hair, woven out of willow twigs and falling in a part down her face. It had her crooked glasses rendered via the bottoms of what looked to be beer bottles. Through some feat of engineering, it wore a bulge on its left hip that seemed the approximation of the ratty fanny pack she’d carried her cigarettes in before making the sudden decision to quit last fall.

She put a hand to it, grinning stupidly. She half-wondered if she wasn’t about to be the first victim in a horror film, or if she might not just be some idiot seeing her reflection in some weirdo’s unrelated art project. 

Still, as she turned about, she firmly believed that the rustle in the nearby brush was neither a lost hiker nor a startled animal. 

**Author's Note:**

> See my [profile](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorpseBrigadier/profile) for notes on remixes, podfic, derivative works, and constructive criticism.
> 
> Thanks to K for the beta!
> 
> * * *
> 
> This story is meant to take place during the annual [Bigfoot Jamboree at Happy Camp](http://www.bigfootjamboree.org/), which takes place annually on Labor Day weekend. I cannot find information as to how many--if any--bigfoot hunters go for a romp through the woods outside of the festival, and both the Siskiyou Cryptid Society and their tour are fictitious.
> 
> The [statue](https://www.flickr.com/photos/lindajm/9356327811/) that Chukosh encounters is real, created by 2006 and Cheryl Wainwright and Ralph Starritt in 2006, and it does stand across the street from the [Klamath-Siskiyou Art Center](http://ksartcenter.org/Art/klamath-siskiyou_art_center.html). The statue Chukosh makes sadly has no real world equivalent of which we know.
> 
> Bigfoot names courtesy of the [Yeti Name Generator](https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/yeti-names.php).


End file.
